"John Stewart, third son of Lydia (Harrison?) and Samuel Stewart,
was born ca. 1735 in Sussex County, Delaware. He married a young
widow, Susanna (Fulkerson) Bledsoe ca. 1760 in Rowan County, North
Carolina. During his adult life John Stewart was a pioneer wherever
he went. When John Stewart was a little boy about seven years old,
his family moved away from Sussex-on-the-Delaware. The family settled
near Linville Creek in Augusta County, Virginia, a section that would
become part of newly formed Rockingham County thirty-five years
later. This is where John grew up, in an area of the Shenandoah
Valley where others from Sussex County, Delaware, lived too. When
John was 18 the family left the Shenandoah Valley and moved to Rowan
County, North Carolina, where ca. 1760 John married."

"Between 1775 and 1778 John moved his family west across the Blue
Ridge Mountains to a branch of the Holston River in Washington
County, North Carolina, the section that became part of new Sullivan
County in 1779. John Stewart was in his early forties at that time
and had covered a lot of territory."

"The first reference to John Stewart on a document is when he was
listed as the surveyor's chain-carrier when his father, Samuel
Stewart, had his 508 acre tract of North Carolina land surveyed on
the Yadkin River on 24 May 1754."

"Most of John's brothers would locate in this general area west of
the Wachovia Tract of the Moravians and near the Yadkin River in the
western part of present-day Forsyth County. However, John traveled
further up the Yadkin, towards Southwestern, Virginia. The big Yadkin
River does not flow east, but south into South Carolina where it
becomes the big Pee Dee River as it then flows to the coast;
therefore, early settlers came mostly from the north, and many of
these came down the Great Wagon Road from Philadelphia. John
Stewart's parents and siblings had come down that road from Augusta
County, Virginia. Here in `The Hollow," in what would later become
Surry County, North Carolina, many came to make their homes. The
Hollow was the section above the modern town of Mt. Airy, North
Carolina, and extended across the Virginia line. Soon after 1756,
when he was twenty-one John Stewart settled in The Hollow, although
there is no official record of his owning land. In the years 1757
through May 1759 traces of Indians had been seen beyond The Hollow
and there was anger and fear in all the land." In the first months of
1759 there was a great lack of food for a hundred miles around, and
Indians were murdering whites in the neighborhood. In the summer of
1759 a typhus fever epidemic killed many throughout North Carolina
and Virginia."

"John would find his future wife, Susanna (Fulkerson) Bledsoe, in
The Hollow. Susanna's father was Frederick Fulkerson and her mother
is thought to be Anna Middlesworth. In her teens (about 1755),
Susanna married Thomas Bledsoe, a widower with nearly grown children.
One son, Loving Bledsoe, was born to Susanna and Thomas Bledsoe.
Thomas died in 1758"

"On 8 October 1759 Frederick Fulkerson conveyed to his young
widowed daughter, Susanna Bledsoe, for the nominal consideration of
five shillings, 500 acres lying on the east side of the middle fork
of the Ararat River."

"On the Rowan County Tax List of 1759 John Stewart's name is
listed, as are Samuel Stewart and David Stewart. About 1760 John
Stewart and the widowed Susanna Fulkerson Bledsoe married."

"Their children were:

1. David Stewart: b. ca. 1761 and

2. William Stewart, My direct line"

"The Hollow, which had the heaviest settlement in Rowan County,
was where John and Susanna started married life. This would be where
their first child, David, was born about 1761. Susanna's son by her
first marriage, Loving Bledsoe, was about six years old. It is likely
that John and Susanna went to Halifax County, Virginia, approximately
the time when her father, Frederick Fulkerson, did. In 1761 Susanna's
father was buying land in Halifax County . John and Susanna, with
Loving and David, probably moved to Halifax County, Virginia, in late
1761 or early 1762. However, John and Susanna would not stay on in
Halifax County as Frederick Fulkerson did."

"Many of the settlers constantly moved up and down and east and
west on the North Carolina and Virginia border east of the Blue
Ridge, buying and selling land."

"Earlier in 1764 John and Susanna had moved back to North
Carolina. Less than two years later John and Susanna sold the rest of
the Rowan County 500-acre tract her father had conveyed to her when
she was a widow. After 1765 there is no further land record for John
and Susanna Stewart in Rowan County, North Carolina, but it is most
likely they lived on some of Frederick Fulkerson's Rowan/Surry County
land, inasmuch as Frederick was in Halifax County, Virginia, until
1772. John's parents had died - Samuel Stewart in late 1768, and
John's mother Lydia in late 1772."

"If John and Susanna were living on some of her father's Surry
county land, it just may have been given to them by him.
Interestingly enough, there is the reference to "Susannah Stuart, a
1771 heiress." John and Susanna stayed on in Surry County a few more
years."

"Sometime between 1775 and 1778 John Stewart took his family over
the "big, blue mountain" to live in Washington District, North
Carolina. One route John Stewart could have used was the route Daniel
Boone used in 1769 when heading for Moccasin Gap in the Clinch
Mountains to enter what is now Kentucky but was then still Virginia.
Leaving from the head of the Yadkin River, the Stewart family could
have taken their course westwardly crossing the Blue Ridge to the
three forks of New River, then over Stone Mountain, next over Iron
Mountain into the Holston River valley until arriving on a stream
south of Long Island which is present Kingsport area."

"In the 1770s many people were flowing into this area. Among them,
partially as a result of the Regulator movement in Surry County,
there was an exodus (that included a great number of Baptists) to the
new frontiers in present-day Tennessee, South Carolina, and Georgia.
It may have been that the Presbyterian Stewarts had become Baptists
on the frontier, but as usual, seeking new land in new places was the
prime reason for moving. Those who went west found homes where they
believed they were beyond the boundary of North Carolina and were in
Virginia, but actually for several years both colonies claimed the
northeastern part of the present state of Tennessee."

"When John's youngest son, our William, volunteered for military
service in 1779 during the American Revolution, he was just over
sixteen. John's son David and stepson, Loving Bledsoe had already
volunteered ."

"Records show that John Stewart was on land in Sullivan County
(then North Carolina) on 10 July 1788 and had sold some land there by
17 November 1790. Whether John retained other land there is not
known. There is no help from the federal census. The first census was
taken in 1790, in which Tennessee was still included in the Salisbury
District of North Carolina."

"Evidence suggests that by ca 1800 John Stewart had crossed from
Sullivan County just over the state line into Russell (now Scott)
County, Virginia, where his son William lived, and where he would be
closer to son David and stepson Loving too. On 22 May 1802 John
Stewart was received "`by experience and baptism" into the Stony
Creek Primitive Baptist Church that son William and his family
belonged to. John was sixty-seven years old. It was here that John
probably died. The date of death of John's wife, Susanna, is not
known. Evidence suggests she had died by April 1782."